“
Yes, I’m sure you feel badly about it all,” she said. She slowly backed away from Troy and ended up walking backwards down the entire hallway. She definitely didn’t want to leave with her back exposed.
On her way to the subway, she checked the rest of her e-mails. She saw the unopened horoscope from astrogirl88. She opened it and what she read stopped her dead in her tracks.
Today you shall reach one of your major goals, only to then realize that it is no longer your dream. This will lead to the end of a toxic situation and the beginning of something greater.
This was ridiculous. She had to find out who was sending these prophetic messages. She exited from her e-mail screen and called Jill. She asked her if she knew anyone who could trace the chain of e-mails. She explained everything that happened the past few days and how the horoscope predicted Jill’s engagement and her job loss. After Jill got over the shock of hearing the news of her termination, she recommended a guy in her newspaper’s IT department. She instructed Memphis to forward her all the correspondence. They would get to the bottom of this.
Memphis arrived home and headed straight for the bathroom. She needed a nice long bath. She soaked for an hour and got out when her extremities began to prune. After putting on her old and worn robe and Little Dipper pajamas, she grabbed some snacks from the kitchen and settled on the sofa for another night of television.
The Universe Now
was on again. It seemed to be on no matter the time. Maybe it was a marathon. She decided to watch it; it was quickly becoming her favorite show. The focus of today’s episode wasn’t on the stars, but on a faraway region nonetheless: the country of Egypt. It was well known among astronomers that Egyptians were very advanced and their myths and religions were based on astronomical and astrological facts.
During her own research on the elliptical, she came across an actual historical figure who was tied to the constellation Ophiuchus; his name was Imhotep. She didn’t know why, but she felt a spark of recognition. She’d been a bit sidetracked from her actual research, but wanted to find out more about this man. Imhotep was the world’s first named physician and the architect who built Egypt’s first pyramid. He was undisputedly the world’s first doctor as well as priest, scribe, sage, poet, and astrologer. Imhotep was also the first known medical professor and a prestigious writer of medical books. As the first medical professor, Imhotep was believed to have been the author of the Edwin Smith Papyrus in which more than ninety anatomical terms and forty-eight injuries were described. He also founded a school of medicine in Memphis, possibly known as “Asklepion,” which remained famous for two thousand years. All of this occurred some 2,200 years before Hippocrates—the western father of medicine—was born.
Virgil was going back further than that in history, to the time of the Gods—the Neteru—who adopted planets to share messages with humans on Earth so they would continue to evolve. He began to tell their story, with which Memphis was familiar.
“
At first there was only Nun. Nun was the dark waters of chaos. One day, a mound rose up out of the waters. This mass was called Ben-Ben. On this mass stood Ra, the first God. A self-centered deity, he was the first being to emerge from the darkness and endless watery abyss that surrounded the world before creation. A product of the energy and matter contained in this chaos, he created divine and human beings in search of love.
“
Alone in the universe with his mind, he created Shu, the God of Air, and Tefnut, the Goddess of Moisture. Shu and Tefnut had two children. They were the first divine couple, and the cosmos were now formed. Their firstborn was Geb, the God of the Earth. Then came Nut, the Goddess of the Sky. Nut and Geb had four children named Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys; they were to be mediators between humans and the cosmos.
“
Osiris was the King of the Earth and Isis was the Queen. Since they were divine without real bloodlines, incest was acceptable. Osiris was a good king and ruled over the Earth for many years. He was to take over Ra’s reign among men. At the time, humans were killing and eating each other. Isis discovered wheat and barley, which grew wild over the land with the other plants and was unknown to man at the time. They taught the people of Egypt to make bread and cut only the flesh of such animals as they taught them were suitable. Osiris went on to teach them laws, and how to live peacefully and happily together.
“
In the meanwhile, his brother Seth was jealous of him and of man. He became a serpent and began to cause trouble among men. The knowledge they received from Osiris began to ebb. Osiris was away, spreading his knowledge and laws around the world, but was alerted by Isis to return home.
“
By the time Osiris returned, his people were no longer walking the path of the divine. They were fighting again. Osiris needed to rest before going forward with a new plan to bring peace among men, but Seth had devised a plan of his own—a plan to kill Osiris and become ruler of Earth, to bring back the chaos which he loved. He devised a plan to trap and suffocate him in a cedar chest. Seth held a feast in honor of Osiris, with the other seventy-two guests being conspirators. During the dinner, he presented the chest to Osiris and told him that he could only have this rare and beautiful piece if he could fit in it. Osiris entered to see if he could fit and was trapped.
“
Seth locked and sealed the chest, then sent it down the Nile River. It landed on the shore of Phoenicia near the city of Byblos. He had killed Osiris. The kingdom of Earth was now his. But Gods could not die; Osiris was sent to the underworld, where he was unable to stop Seth.
“
Isis wandered back and forth over the land of Egypt, but never could she find a trace of the chest in which Osiris’s body lay. She asked all whom she met, but no one saw it and she couldn’t use her magick to find it.
“
Finally she came across a child who was playing by the riverside. She asked if he saw the chest and he replied yes, toward the Great Green Sea. And because of this, Isis blessed the child and decreed that ever afterwards this child should speak words of wisdom and sometimes tell of things to come. The name of the child playing by the riverside was Imhotep.
“
Isis searched for Osiris’s remains until she found the chest embedded in a tree trunk, which was holding up the roof of a palace in Byblos on the Phoenician coast. She managed to remove the coffin and open it, but Osiris had already passed on. She used a spell she learned from Thoth and brought him back to life so he could impregnate her. Afterwards, his spirit returned to the underworld and she hid his body in the desert. Months later, she gave birth to Horus.
“
Seth came across Osiris’s body while hunting one night; enraged, he tore the body into fourteen pieces and scattered them throughout the land.
“
Now, Isis had to begin her search once more, but this time her sister, Nephthys, helped. She left her husband after discovering he killed their brother and was responsible for the chaos of the world.
“
Slowly, piece by piece, Isis recovered the fragments of Osiris. Wherever she did so, she formed by magic the likeness of his whole body and caused the priests to build a shrine and perform his funeral rites. And so there were thirteen places in Egypt that claimed to be the burial place of Osiris. In this way, she also made it harder for Seth to meddle further with the body of the dead god.
“
The one piece she did not recover was his life-giving phallus, and it is said that upon this piece grew the Tree of Life. She gathered the pieces together, rejoined them by magic and made a likeness of the missing member so that Osiris was complete. She then instructed that the body be embalmed and hidden away in a place of which she alone knew. After this, the spirit of Osiris remained in the underworld to rule over the dead until the last great battle, when Horus should slay Seth and Osiris would return to Earth once more.
“
As Horus grew in this world, the spirit of Osiris visited him often and taught him all that a great warrior should know. He told him that he would be the one to fight against Seth, both in the body and in the spirit. And finally, Osiris informed his son when the time came for Horus to fight. Horus declared war on Seth. Osiris instructed him to form a great army and sail up the Nile to attack him in the deserts of the south. Horus gathered his forces and prepared to begin the war. Ra himself, the shining father of the gods, came to his aid in his own divine boat that sailed across the heavens and through the dangers of the underworld.
“
Before they set sail, Ra drew Horus aside so as to gaze into his blue eyes, because whoever looked into them—gods or men—saw the future reflected there. As he gazed into the future, he saw Seth just as he was attacking in the present. Seth had his own methods of telling the future and saw that Horus was set to attack him. It was already too late; Seth aimed a blow of fire at the eyes of Horus.
“
Horus was taken to receive aid, but had already lost an eye. Ra waited for him to recover before returning to the sky. He told Isis his secret name so she may give Horus a more powerful eye—one that could destroy Seth and rebuild Earth, restoring order among men. Horus would not only be able to see the future, but he would also be able to change it. Knowing the secret name of Ra was the most ancient and powerful source of power.
“
Once Isis rebuilt the eye of her son and created an entity called Wadjet to protect it from any harm, she wrote the name of Ra down on papyrus and buried it where no one would find it. She continued this tradition whenever she discovered new magic she felt no one else should know or was too powerful to use. She had a Sphinx constructed over the secrets to keep them safe.
“
Horus was now ready to wage a true war against Seth. There were many battles in that war, but the last and greatest was at Edfu, where the great temple of Horus stands to this day in memory of it. The forces of Seth and Horus drew near to one another among the islands and the rapids of the First Cataract of the Nile. Horus, with his strengthened Wadjet Eye, was able to defeat Seth.
“
He became the ruler of Earth. He spent his rule attempting to restore the order and peace that Osiris created and dispel the chaos that Seth brought upon man. He tried to pass on the messages of his father, but the humans were no longer receptive. There were only a chosen few. Horus appointed them as teachers of man to spread the word and to one day bring the world back to order.
“
But when Horus passed from Earth and reigned no more as the God King, he appeared before the assembly of the gods. Seth also came in the spirit and contended in words for the rule of the world. They are still struggling for power, for the souls of men, and for the rule of the world. Order versus Chaos on Earth. The Egyptians believed that the Last Battle was still to come and that Horus would defeat Seth in this as well. And when Seth was destroyed forever, Osiris would rise from the dead and return to Earth, bringing with him all those who had been his own faithful followers.
“
And for this reason, the Egyptians embalmed their dead and set the bodies away beneath towering pyramids of stone, and deep in the tomb chambers of western Thebes, so the blessed souls returning from the underworld should find them ready to enter again and live forever on Earth under the good god Osiris, his queen Isis, and their son Horus.
“
The final battle of good versus evil has not yet taken place. Horus will be victorious on that day Osiris and the rest of the Gods will return to the Earth, and there will be peace and order, not chaos.”
Memphis recalled reading about the theory that right now we lived in a deterministic chaos—that there was still order, but it was below the surface. She actually felt sympathy for Seth. He wasn’t always evil; his jealousy and thirst for power were his downfall. She couldn’t imagine having a sibling she was jealous of or hated that much. She couldn’t imagine having a family she didn’t love.
Chapter 8
In New York, when a woman finds her life crumbling around her, she does not go crazy. She goes to yoga. That was what Memphis spent the rest of the week doing—that, and of course job searching. She needed a position that would fit in with her class schedule. She wanted to file a complaint against Jonathan with the university, but she worried that if he had enough pull to get her a fellowship without her applying, he probably enough pull to get her thrown out of the entire program. She reevaluated her career path. Academia wasn’t for her; she wanted to make money rather than a name for herself. She would look into space exploration or maybe computer science—fields that would keep her far from the reach of Jonathan’s tentacles.
Watching
The Universe Now
had given her ideas for the type of research she wanted to do. She sent Virgil White another e-mail to check on the status of her natal chart request and to inquire if they could discuss research in the field of archeoastrology, but he hadn’t responded yet. She texted Jill to check in on the case of the mysterious horoscopes. This morning, she received one that warned her that someone close to her would have a brush with death and it would be up to her to save them. Talk about pressure.
This last missive frightened her; if this was a joke, it was no longer funny. Hopefully, her urgent message and the fact that it could possibly be Jill herself, since she was practically the only person she saw as close, who could die would push her to put more pressure on their source in IT. In the meantime, she needed to remain in child’s pose or she would jump out of a window.